You should be familiar with centralized version control (like Subversion). And I think you should also understand distributed version control (like Mercurial).

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You don't have to be an expert in all these things. But any decent developer should have at least a basic understanding of these concepts and be able to understand what they are when someone else mentions one.

Our industry is REALLY weak on education. We go to school and learn about data structures, semaphores, virtual memory, file systems, etc. Then we graduate, get jobs in Software Engineering and promptly never use any of that. I'm not saying it's not useful stuff to know; it is useful to know. But its not what you deal with day to day as a software engineer.

You can't be a software engineer without knowing the stuff on this list. I'm serious. If you don't know it, you're just a dude who's hacking out code.

That said, I'm pretty sure I'm just a dude who's hacking out code... What things do you think I should have on this list before I write another line of code?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The main practice of DDD (Domain Driven Design) is refactoring to deeper insight. The idea is very similar to much of what the Agile practices preach. Namely, when you find you have

misunderstood something or made a mistake

been given bad information

learned something new that changes previous assumptions

You go back and you update your code to reflect your new understanding. In Agile, this is called embracing change, in DDD its refactoring to deeper insight.

This is one of those principles that seems like it shouldn't need to be said. If someone knows that what they've done isn't right anymore who WOULDN'T go back and fix it?! But it turns out this is one place where real life and theory don't line up. The thinking usually goes something like this:

We've spent a lot of time working on this feature, we're out of budget, it works fine in 90% of the cases, and we can just add this little hack that will take care of the other 10%. Therefore it makes more sense for us to just do the little hack.

I'm sure you've seen this line of thinking before, so you're already anticipating that I'm going to say this is stupid. But hold on. Its not stupid. This is actually totally sensible thinking, but there are two problems:

You made up that thing about "90% of the cases." You actually have no idea how often the "edge cases" that are a problem for you will crop up. And for all you know, those may be the more important cases, which your system can now only accommodate with a weird hack.

You haven't considered changes that might arise in the future, or insights you may have in the future. If any do crop up that are related to the "10%" edge cases, you're now going to be forced to build hacks on top of hacks (on top of hacks, on top of hacks, on top of hacks...).

So obviously you should never write the hack, you should always embrace the change and refactor to deeper insight.

Nope, sorry, wrong again. Unfortunately we are here living in the real world. We have real world constraints: Time and Money. If we always took the time to fix everything we discovered we got slightly wrong we would never deliver a product, ever. And shipping is a feature.

So... sometimes we're going to have to hack, which might get us into a world of trouble? And sometimes we're going to have to blow our budget refactoring? How do we know when to do which?

In Strategic Design - Responsibility Traps Eric Evans (the founder of DDD) says "the whole system will not be well designed." This is an inescapable fact if you're working on a large complex system. If you're working on a small simple system, maybe you can pull it off, but even then I doubt it.

How can the guy who's whole development technique revolves around refactoring to deeper insight say the whole system will not be well designed? Well, he has an answer of sorts. Evans says that what you need to do is identify your application's Core Domain. What is it that your application does that sets it apart, makes it important, or provides the most value for the users? That's your Core Domain. Now if a change crops up in the Core Domain, you refactor to deeper insight. This is the most important part of your app! It's the part you'll be building on for everything else in your app. This is the part of your app has to be perfectly designed.

But what about parts that are NOT the Core Domain? Or what if it's not so easy to define your app's Core Domain? Then what do you do? Well, you weigh the options, and take your best guess.

Is there time in the budget?

How hard will it be to refactor to account for this change?

How much better will the app be if you do change it (time saved? # people affected? usability? performance? correctness?)?

Can you convince yourself it is unlikely other changes will have to be made in the future that will be related to this change?

Once you have answers to these questions that are as accurate as you can manage, then you have to just guess. Because your answers to these questions are NOT scientific. And you have no way to predict the future. But you have to try anyway, so you guess.

If you think it's going to be very hard to accommodate the change and you think the change wont make your app all that much better, then hack it. If that's reversed, refactor it.

I'm a programmer, and I'm hungry for perfection, so I always lean toward wanting to refactor it. I think refactoring to make it correct anytime you have the time and ability is the right move. You'll end up with an app you're proud of, that works better for your users, and is easier to maintain and update. But we have to face facts! Sometimes the cost is simply too high. Sometimes we're forced to hack it now, and pay the consequences later.

The good news is that DDD helps tremendously with this. If you can define a Core Domain, you're that much better off because you have now decided what your application is all about. This will help you in every decision you need to make.

Further more, DDD is drastically easier to refactor and maintain than spaghetti code. So the cost of refactoring to deeper insight is lowered when you're writing DDD.

But in the end, we have to realize that DDD is not about writing perfect code. Its about writing good code, that makes the complexity of your application manageable. But we know that despite all the benefits DDD can bring, it doesn't promise perfection. The simple truth is that software is very very hard to write, and designing enterprise applications is even harder. So the best we can do is write Good Enough software, like they say in The Pragmatic Programmer. But hopefully DDD will help us to raise the bar on how good that software is.

Monday, November 2, 2009

A looooooooong time ago I wrote a post called Theory of Software Usability. This post was primarily about the tradeoff between “Ease of Learning” and “Ease of Use.”

I used my favorite example of Vim vs. Notepad. Vim is an advanced modal editor that a n00b wont even be able to get text into if they don’t know what they’re doing. Whereas Notepad is just about the simplest application you can imagine that anyone can figure out how to use.

My argument was that Vim is extremely usable but difficult to learn while Notepad is extremely learnable, but not really all that usable. So there is an implicit tradeoff between Learnability and Usability.

Recently I have been reading The Design of Everyday Things and I can across a concept that is an interesting corollary to the Usability vs. Learnability issue. The book presents “The Tradeoff between Knowledge in the World and in the Head”. Knowledge in the world is simply information that is readily available in the world, so you don’t have to learn it, or at least you don’t have to learn too much. In The Design of Everyday Things an example of a typist is used.

“Many typists have not memorized the keyboard. Usually each letter is labeled, so nontypists can hunt and peck letter by letter, relying on knowledge in the world and minimizing the time required for learning. The problem is that such typing is slow and difficult… But as long as the typist needs to watch the keyboard, the speed is limited.

If a person needs to type large amounts of material regularly, further investment is worthwhile: a course, a book, or an interactive computer program… It takes several hours to learn the system and several months to become expert. But the payoff of all this effort is increased typing speed, increased accuracy, and decreased mental load and effort at the time of typing.”

At the end the book presents some tradeoffs between knowledge in the head and in the world in terms of 5 properties, retrievability, learning, efficiency of use, ease of use at first encounter, and aesthetics. It breaks down like this, knowledge in the world is retrievable, requires little to no learning, is not efficient, is easy to use at first encounter, and can be unaesthetic and inelegant. On the other hand, knowledge in the head is not retrievable, requires lots of learning, is efficient, is not easy at first encounter, and can lead to better aesthetics. So basically, they are at odds with each other.

Bringing back my Vim vs Notepad example, we can see how this fits right in. Notepad puts all the knowledge you need “in the world.” All the labeled keys on your keyboard do exactly what you’d expect and the other functions are clearly labeled in the menus. In Vim on the other hand, you can’t even enter text until you learn the “i” command. The knowledge must be in your head. All the tradeoffs listed above apply perfectly to this example.

I think this is a very important concept to keep in mind when doing software design. Who is your user? What job are they doing? Often often will they be doing that job? Will new people need to figure it out on the fly, or will the same people always do it over and over again? The answers to these questions will help you decide if you should emphasize knowledge in the world or knowledge in the head. If you are building a public facing website that many people will visit, you want to emphasize knowledge in the world. If you are building an application for something like data entry you may want to emphasize knowledge in the head.

The important thing to take away from this is that there is a tradeoff and you have to make a decision one way or the other. Knowledge in the world is not always better than knowledge in the head, and vice versa. Pay attention to what you are building and who you are building it for and design accordingly.